The walls of Ávila, and Santa Teresa: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
The walls, and Santa Teresa
Ávila's wall and its churches frame the life of Teresa of Jesus, who was baptised, schooled, professed and reformed her order inside and just outside them, while Romanesque churches and Renaissance palaces fill the streets between.
The stops
This is the most solemn part of Ávila's wall: two towers about 20 metres high, joined by a semicircular arch, with a bridge between them that is described as unique among European town walls. A restoration in 1907 gave it battlements in imitation of the San Vicente gate. The wall as a whole, together with the old town and its churches outside the walls, became a World Heritage Site in 1985.
Photo: Emilio J. Rodríguez Posada — CC BY-SA 4.0 A woman from Ávila named Mencía López obtained a papal bull in 1508 to found this convent of Augustinian nuns, and in 1510 the bishop handed the Augustinians a hermitage to serve as its church. The convent also ran a boarding school for girls. In July 1531, at her father's wish, Teresa came here as a pupil and stayed eighteen months, learning about prayer and spiritual life from the nun María de Briceño.
Photo: Xemenendura — CC BY-SA 4.0 This Romanesque church faces the Alcázar gate across the Plaza de Santa Teresa, which is also known as the Mercado Grande. A document of 1103 is the first to mention it. It has a Latin-cross plan with three naves ending in three apses, three Romanesque doorways and a large rose window on its west front.
Photo: JnCrlsMG — CC BY-SA 4.0 This convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns, built from 1562, was the first foundation of Teresa of Jesus. The church by Francisco de Mora went up only in the early 17th century, after her death, and its front, a pediment over a porch of three arches, became a model for Discalced Carmelite buildings. A museum here keeps relics of the saint.
Photo: Rafa Esteve — CC BY-SA 4.0 This church already stood before 1150 and was remodelled in Romanesque style at the end of the 12th century. With no services after the 18th century, it served as the cathedral chapter's grain store and, after the confiscations of the 19th century, became a workshop and service station until the state took it back in the 1960s. It now serves the Ávila museum as a visitable store for its stonework and largest pieces.
Photo: Cruccone — CC BY 3.0 Planned as a cathedral and a fortress, its apse forms one of the turrets of the city wall; Ávila calls it the cimorro. Counted among the first Gothic cathedrals in Spain, it shows French influence, and the apse, in the charge of the master Fruchel from 1172, is mainly of a red-veined stone known as bleeding stone. Adolfo Suárez, Spain's prime minister from 1976 to 1981, is buried inside with his wife.
Photo: Fernando — CC BY-SA 4.0 One of the best examples of Romanesque architecture in Spain, built of warm-coloured stone and finished in the 14th century with the support of Alfonso X and Sancho IV. According to tradition the martyrs Vicente, Sabina and Cristeta were laid in the rock where it stands, and the polychrome stone cenotaph inside is one of the finest Romanesque sculptures in Spain. Another Ávila tradition says Teresa took off her shoes before the Virgen de la Soterraña here, on her way from the Encarnación to San José.
Photo: Fernando — CC BY-SA 4.0 Suero de Águila, equerry to the infante Fernando, brother of Charles I, had this palace built in 1531, in the boom years of Ávila's wool trade. The plateresque front is sober and defensive, with no windows low down, a broad tower at each side and, to the left, a stone verraco from Vettonian times like the dozens scattered through the city. Since 2008 it has been the seat of the secretariat of the Spanish World Heritage Cities Group.
Photo: Zarateman — CC BY-SA 3.0 es This chapel takes its name from Mosén Rubí de Bracamonte, lord of Fuentesol. It was first late Gothic, on a Greek-cross plan, and was remodelled in the Mannerist style in the second half of the 16th century. It was declared a monument of cultural interest in 1991.
Photo: Håkan Svensson (Xauxa) — CC BY 2.5 Teresa entered this Carmelite convent in the mid-1530s, and here she was first a nun and later prioress, before she began founding convents of her new order, the Discalced Carmelites. A chapel was raised over her cell in 1630, and the convent museum keeps testimonies of her and the original parlours where she received visitors. The great bell gable on the south wall dates from 1715.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 Ávila's main square is rectangular, with arcades on three sides, the town hall on its north-east side and the church of San Juan facing it. In the Middle Ages the guilds gathered around it, which is why nearby streets are named Pescadería, Zapateros, Carnicerías and Cuchillería. Its present form is a neoclassical project of the 19th century, and the square has had many names, returning to Mercado Chico on 30 March 2001.
Photo: Brian Adamson — CC BY 2.0 Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada, who became known as Saint Teresa of Jesus, was baptised in this church. She was born in 1515, usually said to be in Ávila, though perhaps at a family country house in Gotarrendura. One of its doors opens onto the Mercado Chico and the main one onto Calle de San Juan; it was declared a national monument in 1983.
Photo: Rafa Esteve — CC BY-SA 4.0 Garcibáñez de Mújica had this Renaissance tower built in 1513 on an earlier building that had belonged to Sancho del Águila. King Alfonso XII stayed here on a visit in 1878, and the Argentine writer Enrique Larreta set part of his 1920 novel La gloria de don Ramiro in it. It is now the seat of the provincial council, and its arcaded courtyard rests on twelve Tuscan columns.
Photo: Rowanwindwhistler — CC BY-SA 3.0 The Discalced Carmelites built this church and convent in the early 17th century, supposedly on the site where Saint Teresa was born. Its odd layout faces north rather than east so that the presbytery coincides with the room where she was born, and a chapel of the saint stands in the right arm of the transept where the family home once was. The front, with a triple arcade, follows the model Francisco de Mora had set at San José, and in 2022 the Vatican named it a minor basilica.
Photo: Carlos Delgado — CC BY-SA 3.0
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